Meet the team: Eran Friendinger, the CTO and co-Founder of Voyantis

We recently published a post in which we shined the spotlight on our CEO, Ido Wiesenberg, and many of our readers absolutely loved it! So we decided to continue this series, and this time shine the spotlight on our CTO, Eran Friendinger. 

In addition to being a savant in all-things-growth and UA, Eran is also an expert on marketing platforms. No, really, we’re constantly pinging him for his thoughts on approaches to tech and marketing, and he offers his insights with full conviction. Eran is quite the veteran, both in terms of army service and in the startup scene. 

The man behind the tech

Before we dive into tech details, let’s talk about Eran as a person. He occasionally enjoys crossfit, and is a hobbyist photographer. He’s known to take his Canon 5D with him everywhere—so while everyone is taking pics with their mobile phones, you would find Eran using his Canon 5D.

He has quite the artistic eye, as you can see below!

Eran’s technological expertise is extensive. He is passionate about activating data into business impact, using the power of algorithms, be them AI, classic mathematics, parametric modeling etc. He also loves building backend data pipelines, and is a big believer in the power of devops. He’s a big believer that this is a necessary skill for any modern-day engineer.

Adience: The rocket ship before Voyantis

In 2013, seven years before Voyantis came to be, Eran co-Founded Adience, a company whose core product allows deep insights into publishers’ mobile audiences, enabling short-loop improvement of the user workflow experience - generating a dramatic increase in ROI. Adience has created a rich and precise mobile-user workflow profiling, using a set of unique technologies that leverage modern Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms, analyzing mobile users on tens of thousands of different data points, on tens of millions of devices.

Adience's solution analyzes marketer's first party data, and uses deep learning to distill it into an analytics profile. The analytics profile is then used to optimize the user's journey. The intense need for such a solution explains why Adience was acquired by MarketTech.

The army life

Remember how we mentioned Eran being quite the veteran? Well, he co-Founded the Adience with two of his comrades from the IDF 81, and 8200 Intelligence Corps unit: CPO Sasha Medvedovsky, and CEO Roee Nahir. In case you didn’t know, being a part of Unit 81 and 8200 is comparable in its function to the United States' National Security Agency, and it is a Ministry of Defense body just as the NSA is part of the United States Department of Defense.

Leading up to Voyantis

At this point you might be wondering how Eran and Ido crossed paths. They were actually introduced by a mutual friend of theirs, who happens to be an investor that participated in funding rounds at both of their (respective) past companies. Another mutual connection further solidified their connection through a founders group in which they brainstormed a lot. 

In one of his previous blog posts with Ido, they explained that, “Although we founded companies in different industries, we both had similar experiences as founders. When we were in the ‘early-stage’ we felt as though it was us and our partners against the world. There was no one to show us the ropes and teach us the right way to go about ideation.” The duo also connected over the fact that they complemented each other's skill sets and weaknesses, while sharing core values in terms of business tasks and management.

On his admiration towards Eran, Ido says, “Eran amazes me on a daily basis with his knowledge of the technicals of marketing tech, predictive modeling, user-level data, and the role of AI. Moreover, him being THE expert in every sales call really helps to build trust super fast.” 

Voyantis came to be through the combination of their skill sets, values, and relentless pursuit towards perfection. When asked what he feels is most special about Voyantis’ technology, he said it is that “it frees marketers from the co-dependence on engineering resources for any data-enabled initiative they want to take. We want to make this THE platform to enable the growth of any modern digital company, using it's single most valuable asset besides their customers - their data.”

A run-down on how to be a CTO like Eran Friendinger

Eran is not just any CTO. He is extremely active, passionate, and super hands-on in helping everyone in the Voyantis team, regardless of their role, reach their full potential. Eran believes that a CTO’s role in a startup is to identify and promote data-driven business and technical growth. A CTO should help the organization lay the foundations of how it thinks, how it asks questions, how it distributes knowledge and learning—basically, how it learns.

You can connect with Eran on LinkedIn and on Twitter.